Bonnie Roy

Nicole Brossard’s burning word

'If ardour is that thing — whether in the romance or the saint’s life — that heats us up to jump from one phase of being to another, Brossard’s ardour intensifies but also idles.' Lamb of God stained glass image from St. Ignatius church in Massachusetts; photo by John Workman via the English Language Wikipedia.

Ardour: the flame of desire; a spiritual, sexual, or physical burning; a passion that the OED tells us now connotes only “generous or noble impulses” though once it could speak of evil. It’s a word I rarely use or hear spoken in conversation. When I think of reading it, I recall English novels. In these stories a girlish face turns upward to receive a kiss; it is the kiss that is imposed with ardour, the girl’s lover who is ardent. When I read for “ardour” online, the books at the top of the list my search returns are religious, moral, martial.

Dreams of relation in Amish Trivedi's 'Sound/Chest'

Sound/Chest begins with a find and a flood. In the basement of the University of Iowa library in 2008, Amish Trivedi discovered an old card catalog and was arrested by its remnant labels. Severed from the content they once organized, the paired words and numbers of the catalog have become the titles of poems that attempt to reanimate lost relationships of sense. The speaker of Sound/Chest feels their way around a disaster whose personal blur sometimes sharpens in a collective phrase, and then simple terms rise, like the storm water that filled the library basement later that summer, with displacing force.

The scopophilic selfie in the écriture transféminine of Juliana Huxtable's 'Mucous in my Pineal Gland — OR Universal croptops for all the self-cannonized saints of becoming, a screen4screen tribute

Juliana Huxtable’s new book kneels to the internet’s largesse, struggles with it like a mother. Inside this struggle: the birth of her sexuality and the body horror of femininity with its projection planes and infinite play. Also, dysphoria, blackness, fetish, queer sex. She memorializes the internet — that two-way gazing machine, the ultimate screen, constituting and constitutive of self, Self, Selfie — in loud clanking blue letters. Laura Jaramillo asserts that ASMR videos recreate a sensory and sensual materiality lost to the digital work-a-day world.

Juliana Huxtable’s new book kneels to the internet’s largesse, struggles with it like a mother. Inside this struggle: the birth of her sexuality and the body horror of femininity with its projection planes and infinite play. Also, dysphoria, blackness, fetish, queer sex. She memorializes the internet — that two-way gazing machine, the ultimate screen, constituting and constitutive of self, Self, Selfie — in loud clanking blue letters.

Thanks to Erik Redling and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek for organizing Beyond Metrical Prosody: New Rhythms in US and German (Post-) Modern Poetry at Freie Universitat in Berlin. The lively discussion underlined the value of this German/American exchange. I was grateful to learn more about the poetry and short lives of Rolf Dieter Brinkman (1940–1975), as presented by Jan Röhnert, and Rainer Maria Gerhardt (1927–1954), presented by Agnes C. Müller. Brinkman translated O’Hara and Berrigan. Olson and Creeley wrote poems for Gerhardt (recordings on PennSound), the editor of FRAGMENTE, a prescient magazine that included them both: MP3 — Olson reading “To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things …” in Berlin in 1966 and MP3: Creeley’s 1956 reading of “For Rainer Gerhardt.”

[N.B. To which she adds, in correspondence: “The elephant is a non-predatory mammal, a sensate being. The poem intersects body and spirit — elephant desire, with the function of marketing, production, distribution and exchange of elephant and rhino body parts by human predators.”]